


constant as a star

by mimizans



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-11-09 15:44:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11107701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimizans/pseuds/mimizans
Summary: Of course he would love her like this, sure and constant.





	constant as a star

**Author's Note:**

> thanks griffin for my life, i can't believe lup/barry reinvented modern romance, etc. etc.
> 
> this is pre-ep. 64, which will be obvious once you read it, and it doubles as a little bit of a lup character study

It’s 0100 by the ship’s clock and Lup is stretched out on a bed that is not her own. Barry, cross-legged next to her, is beaming and gesturing wildly. His arms swing in wide, sweeping arcs and his hands clench and unclench at intervals, like he’s trying to encompass within his grasp the entirety of a universal truth that they’re just beginning to understand. His fingertips are very close to brushing the woven red drapes that he made a few cycles ago to hang over the small porthole next to his bunk. 

As she listens to him speak about the minutiae of multiverse theory, Lup lets Barry drift out of focus and watches the fireflies dance outside of the ship. She remembers watching fireflies as a child, curled up near her brother as they did their best to survive on strange roads with stranger people. The memory might have made her sad, once, but now she’s almost nostalgic for the uncertainty of those days, when the only thing to fight for was their own survival. Now... so much more hangs in the balance, and Lup sometimes feels homesick for a time when the existence of a billion, billion universes didn’t rest on her shoulders.

Barry trails off, his hands no longer making trips through the planar system he’d painted in the air above his bed. Lup’s eyes are gritty with the urge to sleep, but she smiles reassuringly up at Barry as he folds his hands in his lap and clears his throat. He gets self-conscious, sometimes, in an insistent, guttural way that makes him go quiet for hours and hours. It happens less often the more time that they spend together, but Lup still dislikes the knowledge that she may’ve played a role in the persistence of Barry’s bouts of self-doubt with her early ribbing. 

At the beginning of their acquaintance, she would often mistake Barry’s exuberance for showmanship or his knowledge for pretension. She also mistook Lucretia’s introverted silence for haughtiness, and Magnus’s good-natured audacity for genuine stupidity. Granted, Lup knows that she didn’t make the greatest first impression either. She knows that she can be brash and pushy, particularly at first blush; it’s reflexive, a holdover from a time when showing that you were not to be fucked with meant the difference between the safety of a sleeping bag near the fire and laying down in the cold roots of a tree, exposed to whatever highway robber or wild animal came along. 

After years spent with people who would kill her as soon as look at her, it took Lup time to realize that her shipmates were genuinely good people - and when she did, it threw her for a quarter century long loop. She watched Merle build a church for no purpose other than to give people hope, and Magnus do his best to save baby animals even when he knew it was futile; she saw Lucretia bent over her journals, desperately trying to record all the joy and pain and sorrow because she’s not sure what else she can do; and Lup saw Barry, spending late nights in the lab out of obligation and curiosity, yes, but also because he felt that the only right thing to do was to try to help everyone, anyone that they could. Lup knows that she's better because of them.

It’s strange and wonderful to be surrounded by people who are full of so much light even as they’re being endlessly pursued by a terrible, hungry darkness, Lup thinks, watching Barry watch her quizzically as her eyes start to close of their own accord.

“Uh, Lup?” Barry asks, leaning forward slightly and then shifting back again, like he’s afraid of getting too close. “Are you okay?”

“Mmhmm,” Lup replies, arching her back and stretching her arms over her head. “Just tired.”

“Oh, sorry I kept you up,” Barry says, laughing quietly in a way that makes something in Lup’s stomach flutter. 

“Nah, I like listening to you talk,” Lup replies, mostly to watch the way that the simple compliment makes Barry turn red. He loves her, she thinks, but he hasn’t said anything yet. 

Lup rolls over to face him, her body already sinking into the soft mattress. She feels warm and comfortable here, with Barry so close, and she wonders when he started to feel like safe harbor. Lup breathes out deeply through her nose and asks,“Would you mind if I just - slept here?” 

“What?” Barry asks, almost reflexively. “Uh, I mean, yeah, of course! If you want to.” He’s still blushing but his gaze is steady on Lup’s face, and Lup gets the feeling, sharp and sudden, that he would give her anything she asked for. It’s an arrogant presumption, maybe, but Lup recognizes the look that Barry is giving her - he’s looking at her like she hung the stars in the sky. Lup knows this look, because it’s the same one she’s been furtively shooting at Barry for years. 

It’s a strange and heady feeling, knowing that someone loves you like that, so earnestly and unselfishly. Lup knows Barry well enough by now to understand that he doesn’t do anything halfway; of course he would love her like this, sure and constant, and look at her so sweetly that Lup feels like she might start glowing from the inside out, like some piece of her soul wants to escape her body and linger in the weight of his gaze. 

Lup knows that he’d give her anything, but she’s not sure what to ask for - not yet - and she’s not sure how to say that she loves him without it sounding trite. She’s not sure how to express the depth of what she feels for him in words, the way that she’s grown to love the little things about him - like the fact that he doesn’t drink coffee but always puts a pot on when he’s the first one up, or the way he sings softly to himself when he’s working. She doesn’t quite know how to tell him that he’s become her best friend, and that when she needs quiet or conversation or distraction or reassurance or any multitude of other things he is the one she goes to first, and she doesn’t know how to explain that for every terrible, gut-wrenching thing that has happened on this journey, she has ten moments that they shared and that she wouldn’t trade for anything. When she’s with Barry, the weight of the multiverse pressing down on her doesn’t feel so crushing. 

She’ll know how to explain it to him one day, Lup figures. For now, they'll love each other silently, and that's enough. She smiles at Barry sleepily. “Thank you,” she says. 

“You’re welcome,” he replies, and reaches over her shoulder to turn off the light before settling down next to her in his too-small bed. Only the light from the fireflies outside the window remains, and Barry is backlit by the soft, white glow as he watches Lup slowly lose her battle with sleep. As Lup’s eyes slide shut, Barry is still smiling at her with soft eyes. “Good night,” he says.

“Good night,” Lup mumbles, and relishes the knowledge that when she wakes up tomorrow, he’ll be smiling at her just the same.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't love this but i'm done fiddling with it, so


End file.
